


Handcuffed to the Briefcase

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Royai Week 2018, implied suicidal ideation, just like 2800 words of two people stomping down on every tender impulse they've ever had, the most mutual of pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 15:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14917691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: "I lost the money, lost the keys,/But I'm still handcuffed to the briefcase."-American Sports, Arctic MonkeysRoy and Riza grapple with the things they want, the things they need, and the things they just can't have.





	Handcuffed to the Briefcase

**Author's Note:**

> For Royai Week 2018, Day 2 "Pining"

Her arms are crossed, one hand folded low across her ribs, the other curled around her opposite shoulder in a way that superficially resembles an embrace, but which he knows is scaffolding. Riza Hawkeye, holding herself upright, cross-braced against the clawing exhaustion apparent in the slumped line of her shoulders.

She turns her head, buried in the crook of her elbow, and her neck _pops_ loudly, and she grimaces vaguely into her arm at the noise.

And Roy Mustang is only human; he has a heart, and it beats, and it bleeds and it burns and it spasms weakly, uselessly against the iron grip of his will. Somewhere in him is a locked room, oxygen pumped out, where he puts impulses like the urge press himself up close behind her, draw her hands down and away, press the knots out of her back himself. Send her home to sleep. Follow her there.

And the room stays locked, anoxic, so the wanting can’t burn him up completely, and he doesn’t go to her, or draw her hands down, or send Riza home, or crawl into her narrow bed that she keeps pushed against the wall with a clear sightline to the door and a gun under the mattress.

He pushes himself up from his desk, and doesn't look at her rolling her neck as he strides past.

"I," he announces, pulling a blithe, light tone out of his mouth with the same degree of effort it took to pull out that bullet she took to the thigh on rooftop a hundred miles away, "am making coffee."

Havoc takes too much cream, and Roy tells him so, and Breda is trying to cut back, and Falman only ever drinks tea, and Fuery is a lost cause who probably hasn't slept in six months, he drinks so much of the damn stuff, and:

"And we'll leave you the grounds to chew on, then, Lieutenant? Will that suffice?" He tosses out, willing his hands still at his sides.

"It isn't my fault you people can't stomach _real_ coffee, instead of that burnt water you drink, sir."

He leaves a cup of coffee, brewed thick enough to chew and three sugar, the way only _she_ ever drinks it, on the edge of her desk, and only ever calls her “Lieutenant”.

 

* * *

 

It’s raining, thick ugly sheets sluicing the windows and he worries about the blood on his hands, but Riza’s more concerned about the nerve-damage.

The gloves are fireproof, to a point, but that doesn’t stop the heat, and at temperatures approaching 70° celsius, skin starts to burn in less than a second and the pryotex chafes; his raw knuckles against an abandoned requisition form are starkly, brutally red. His hands are prone to cracking, and they bleed in the cold.

The thin, grey rain-light washes him out, throws the straining tendons of his wrist into harsh relief as he digs his thumb into the meat of his palm, and there’s a half-healed burn curled wormy and pink around the hard knob of his joint, right where the gloves stop. There almost always is. His veins are the same colour as his uniform cuff and his lips twitch at intervals, flashing his gritted teeth, and you wouldn't even see any of it unless your desk was kicked out twenty-odd degrees from true to give you a clear shot into his office. Just in case.

So he’s abandoned his paperwork, and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s because the rain makes him maudlin, or because abandoning his paperwork is what Roy _does_ , or just because he can’t hold the pen.

She keeps lidocaine in her desk drawer, and there are eight new field reports that need his signature and their hands don’t touch, not at all, when she hands them both over.

 

* * *

 

What passes for his conscience these days sounds more and more like Berthold Hawkeye, a  lecture punctuated by his vaguely arthritic limp.

It says:

You are an Alchemist. Alchemists are seekers after truth. Alchemists are nothing more than what they can prove. You are nothing more than the sum total of what you know.

(An engine backfires one street over, and it sounds almost exactly like the old man banging his cane down on his desk for emphasis)

It says:

Stop speculating. What do you know, boy, what are the _facts?_

Fact:

If _When_ they go to trial, Riza stands a far better chance being pardoned than he does.

Fact:

He does not deserve to be pardoned.

Fact:

There is a small chance he could be sentenced to _live_ , and be shipped off to Ishval to rebuild, but then, military court never was known for its talent with metaphor, and so:

Fact:

Most likely, he will die by firing squad, and:

Fact:

Nobody wants to die alone, if even you deserve to, and the thought of it catches in his throat like a lungful of smoke, like the meat he can no longer bring himself to swallow, not since he noticed the smell of steak is almost _exactly_ the same as the reasons he is going to die, alone, shot by a firing squad, but then:

Fact:

He doesn’t want Riza to watch him die.

Fact:

He can’t stop her. Never could.

He’s taking too long to shave, dragging the razor lingeringly across his throat. It catches, almost wistfully, at the hinge of his jaw, but the blood that wells up sluggishly after the cut looks nothing like it did back then. The light is somehow _thinner_ in Ishval.

Roy watches himself bleed.

Fact: Tattoo inks are composed of a colorant (which may be either mineral or organic in basis) and a carrier (most commonly water, glycerin, or various alcohols). All are comprised of elements you could buy with pocket change.

Hypothesis:

If he were a better man, he could have opened a vein, and turned the carbon in the ink back into flesh, and he never would’ve hurt her.

Hypothesis:

If he were a _good_ man, he would’ve done it before the war.

 

* * *

 

Roy’s hair is the color of three in the morning, feathered across the bone-yellow of Lacoste et.al (1912), and she lets herself wonder, just briefly, if it would be that dark, blue-black like loss, like crawling off the first morning train into downtown in January, against her faded pillowcase, if his cheek would press into her mattress the way it crushes against “Stabilization of Turbulent Flame Structures”.

But. He has never asked to stay the night, and she doesn’t offer, and they share only as many late-night coffees as two people who’ve known each other for the better part of twenty years could be reasonably expected to share. Probably less.

(Definitely less.)

But it’s ten-thirty in the morning, not three, and he’s not “Roy” when they’re working, like she’s not “Riza”, like this isn’t the middle of night, wringing out a plaintive, methodical orgasm, trying to force enough exhaustion to sleep and not thinking of any names, at all.

The kind thing to do would be to let him sleep, even if it is slumped over an abstract in the Archives. And it would be a small kindness, Riza speculates. Ten minutes. He looks exhausted.

Lieutenant Hawkeye is not kind. There nothing between Lieutenant Hawkeye and her commanding officer except scars and shared necessity.

“ _Sir.”_ she says, low and harsh, jostling him awake with one hand pressed firmly, professionally, against his spine. “You have a meeting with High Command in twenty minutes.”

 

* * *

 

It’s not like burning a field.

Burning a field is easy.

It is a brutal, thankless work, like burning a field, and salting it, and going back out every day to rip up the weeds that just won’t stop coming back, down on your knees in the dirt with the grime caked so deeply into the cracks of your bleeding hands it never washes out.

And it’s _fine,_ it’s _fine,_ he’s no stranger to thankless work or dirty hands, it’s just that Riza takes the first morning train from her flat into Central HQ, and he passes the station on his own way in every day, and does not, even once, meet her at the platform.

She walks Hayate down a street just one over from the curb where Roy keeps the car, and he doesn’t, not even once, offer her a ride home in the rain.

And he wonders, sometimes, if it’s really _necessary_ , if anyone would even _bother_ , if maybe this is just some kind of imagined penance, if it’s making him a worse man than he already is to be flattening every tender impulse he ever has because neither of them think they deserve to be happy. Because it’s against regulations. Because a _good man_ wouldn’t do something like that, even if half the good men in Central have done worse--hell, _he’s_ done worse, and it’s just that dragging himself kicking and screaming into being a _good man_ is a brutal, thankless, _lonely_ work.

He doesn’t _want_ to a good man, he wants –

He misses Maes.

 

* * *

 

Whoever’s at the door, she’s going to kill them.

The insistent knocking drills into the back of her skull, a sinus-bruising tattoo that sends Hayate pawing and whining at the door, and it’s his plaintive barking that finally drags Riza off the couch, shoving her fever-sweaty hair back from her face, cursing under her breath.

Her head swims, her joints throb and whoever’s at the door is going to _die_ for the intrusion. She’s not _well_.

So she staggers to the door, juggling the dog under one arm, sidearm in one hand (just in case), and opens the door and doesn’t say “Roy?”

And the thing is, he was never supposed to see her like this, feverish and sweaty-haired and weak-kneed. There’s too much _her_ on display, not enough _Lieutenant Hawkeye_ , the Colonel’s implacable, immovable right-hand man, and it shakes her to the core, but she’s--

She can’t afford to be happy to see him. He shouldn’t have come. But it’s _there_ , hiding behind a cough as she croaks:

“To what do I owe the pleasure, _sir?_ ”

“I,” Roy intones loftily, “am here in my official capacity.”

He is _decidedly_ out of uniform if that’s true, wearing something linen and breezy that bares the hollow of his throat, which she does not let herself look at. He hefts a bag up in one hand, and she ignores the way the motion pulls his shirt across his chest.

She ignores his smile. Ignores the look he gives her, tamps down the flutter in her gut until all that’s left is Lieutenant Hawkeye’s flat stare, unwavering, even as she lets Hayate down.

“Here to award First Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye special commendation for exemplary service to Amestris.” he says, and hands her the bag. It’s warm, and it smells almost like...

It was the second summer after he came to stay with her father, and she was laid up with a fever for two weeks, shivering and sweating in her little attic room and nobody had done the shopping because she was sick and her father was working and Roy was back in the city visiting his aunt, and he’d come back and cobbled together soup from a handful of wilted vegetables and the remains of his Xingese takeout lunch from that one place next to the train station and brought it up to her, and it was, at the time, the best thing she’d ever tasted, even if, in retrospect, it may have been closer to a hangover cure than a cold remedy.  But he shouldn’t have brought it _now_ , when she can’t thank him for it, and shouldn’t even _have_ childhood memories of _Colonel Mustang_.

Riza closes the door.

 

* * *

 

If he let himself, which he can’t, Roy could slump just a little to his right, and press his shoulder against hers, warm and solid under the her uniform. Instead, he focuses intently on the sound of clinking silverware and the low of hum of lunch-break chatter, including:

“In all seriousness, sir, you have a duty of _care_ , I mean, the kid sees you as, like, a father!” Havoc concludes, one arm curled  around Fuery’s shoulder, and his mouth wrapped simultaneously around a cigarette, a bit of dubious sandwich, and whatever bullshit he’s off on now. Fuery shrinks away from the embrace (and the crumbs) as best he can on the narrow canteen bench, shaking his head.

“I really don’t,” he protests, and then, abruptly, sputtering, wide-eyed, “N-not that I don’t admire you-your, your career and accomplishments, sir, I–“

“Stand down, sergeant.” Roy snorts, “The lieutenant is talking out his ass again, and I think we can all recognize that.”

“Hey! With all due respect sir, I am _extremely_ perceptive, as befits the military’s _number_ _one_ sniper, who you are at risk of losing, sir, I could transfer anytime, so I _think–“_

_“_ Jean. I already _have_ the military’s number one sniper, I only picked you up so I’d have a matched set, and I’m willing to be flexible on that point.” He pins Havoc with a flat stare over the rim of his coffee mug. “You’re just lucky they still split the rankings by gender.” Leaning in conspiratorially, Roy adds, “She’s better than you.”

And if nothing else, which can never _be_ anything else, she’s his friend (he hopes), she’s sitting right next to him, and their heavy boots are exactly parallel under the table, and she’s laughing, soft and dry, like she does, with a half-smile tucked into the corner of her mouth as she shrugs, one-shouldered, and says “Sorry, Havoc.”

It lifts her shoulder right up against his, just for an instant, and his mouth goes dry.

Roy leans, _makes_ himself lean away, and at least he can see her face better, now. She doesn’t laugh enough. He wants to make her laugh. He wants a world in which the culmination of his life’s work doesn’t end with the both of them dead inside the next ten years, if all goes well. He wants to slide across the inch between them. He wants, he wants, he _wants,_ but Chris Mustang didn’t raise the kind of rube who’d let it show on his face. His eyes glitter with the joke, he smirks, he hears himself say, “I don’t suppose your friend Catalina might need a change of scenery?”

Riza snorts, tossing her head, and he can just see a sliver of her neck, as she drawls “I’ll ask next time I see her, sir.”

If nothing else, they’re friends. It’s enough.

 

* * *

 

It tastes like a mouthful of glass, sharp and cold, a blood-slick slime of the thing she can’t say.

“ _What am I supposed to do with your life in my hands?”_

And it’s not _fair,_ that people keep giving her these things to bear, ink on her back and sand thick in her throat, which she never asked for, and how is she supposed to decide when he’s gone too far?

Is Roy Mustang, the flirt, a calculated method to get people to underestimate him, or a bid to throw the election years in advance? Is he sabotaging them because he doesn’t want to die? Is he kind because he’s being genuine, or to convince her not to kill him? Does he know how to be genuine?

She tells herself he didn’t mean to hurt her.

She tells herself that doesn’t matter.

It’s just that he can be so charming when he’s trying to be, and even more when he’s not, flashing what she can’t help but think if as his _real_ smile as he congratulates Breda, whose pocket he just picked, on a photo tucked into the man’s wallet.

“Where the _hell_ did you learn to do that?!”

_Nancy,_ she thinks, Nancy taught him how to pickpocket, like Violet taught him to swear and Emily taught him how to make whiskey sours. And how is she Supposed to know that and still kill him if she has to? She’s a sniper, she needs _distance,_ somewhere she can’t see how horribly young he looks with his hair in his eyes like that, where she she won’t feel the impulse to be tender coming on like a sickness.

The problem is, is that as much she hates him for putting his life in her hands, she wouldn’t trust anyone else with it, not even him.

The problem is, is that she would forgive him almost anything. She knows she would.

 

* * *

 

Riza is re-assigned.

They say their goodbyes in Roy’s office.

They pass in the hallways, and at lunch.

He calls, sometimes, not as often as before, but sometimes.

It’s not enough.


End file.
